Social Media Campaign Review: Ford India’s One Tank, 1500Kms, One Classic Story

Ford India launched its campaign One Tank, 1500Kms, One Classic Story on 10th August.

The campaign provides a platform for 11 individuals to journey towards their dream destination in a Ford Classic. The team will travel to the destination on one full tank across 1500kms. Each individual has a reason for choosing the destination of his choice and will be accompanied by a filmmaker to help capture the entire journey to be shared as web episodes. This fairly explains the One Classic Story part.

The 11 participants are divided into 8 teams and each team has its own creative name. The teams were flagged off from Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai and Chennai in 8 cars.

The campaign is not a user-engagement strategy, although the gratification for the winning cinematographer (short film) is Rs. 100,000/-. The campaign is purely an influencer strategy with a host of celebrities teaming from different parts of the country.

The positioning of Ford Classic in market has been as a car that personifies individuals who have a passion and the conviction to realize them. Banking on this positioning, the participants are celebrities in their own right, for instance:

Magician Sandeep Bali

Photographer Priyanka Sachar

Techie Abhishek Baxi

Musicians Gaurav Vaz & Raghu Dixit

Food enthusiast/chef Madhu Menon

Cricket buffs Rahul Banker & Akash Jain

Music/movie buffs Errol Marks & Jaey Gajera

Artist Vinod Chandra.

Facebook and Twitter are the primary active platforms for this campaign.

Positives

The Facebook page is buzzing with live updates from the teams on the move. The content is generated by the teams traveling to different destinations across the country. The application built for Facebook is rich in its features, looks and interface. The participant bios are provided along with the twitter feed of #1TankFull. Videos from the participating cinematographers are also uploaded on the application tab.

Scope of Improvement

The campaign can easily confuse the audience. The details about the campaigns are not that explanatory. There are too many Indian aspects being played with at the same time: cricket, music, bollywood, photography and more.

If the idea was to target the audience with different tastes, this campaign has gone all over the place. A cricket lover is more likely to follow the Pitch Drivers and hence, will completely ignore the rest.

The road map is not very clear having declared only the starting point and ending point. If the user wants to know what the Cricket Team is doing, he will have to follow the team on twitter. The Facebook updates do not give you a good idea of what is the team up to. Moreover, there are 8 teams doing 8 different things at the same time. It is not easy for the user to keep a track of all the 8 teams.

The participants are also tweeting about the activities from their personal accounts using the hashtag #1tankfull and supported by Ford India Twitter handle.

The campaign revolves heavily around the influencers. Ford India chose celebrities from 8 genres and sent them on a road trip to fulfill their dreams. No one bothered to ask, “what’s in it for the audience?”

Nothing really. You see, you read, you forget.

The only valid explanation would be that Ford India wanted to populate its brand among the influencers and let them spread the word through blogs, Facebook updates and Twitter. And they want to position their car as fuel efficient.

Uday Mane, best known to many as The Allegorist, is a Social Media expert, planner and consultant who works as a free-lancer. He eats, breathes and lives for his passion of story writing. He is nocturnal and spends most of his night working on romantic, dramatic, and murderous plots that he converts into short stories and publishes on his blog www.theallegorist.wordpress.com